Gardiner V., Matthews H. The changing geography of the United Kingdom
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Owner-occupancy rates among skilled manual workers changed from 52 per cent in 1981
to 76 per cent in 1996, and among unskilled manual workers from 27 per cent to 43 per
cent. The policies of council house sales and an emphasis upon housing improvement rather
than renewal have underpinned these trends. The private rented sector showed the greatest
decline over the longer period with a fall from 61 per cent in England and Wales in 1947 to
15 per cent in 1970. The advent of housing associations added a dimension to the private
rented sector, but in 1996 the share was still only of the order of 14 per cent. Private landlords
remain important in central parts of major cities, especially London, and the development
of controls to give a wider protected housing market has been a feature. One estimate
suggested that over 90 per cent of British urban housing enjoyed a significant measure of
protection.
The housing market is often cited as a significant factor in understanding the ongoing
process of urban change. As already mentioned, negative equity became a feature during
the early 1990s and marked, if not the end, at least a set-back to the long process of rising
value of residential property. Up to the 1960s, land value was a key consideration with an
index change from 100 in 1939 to 1615 in 1963. After 1974, there was far more stability in
the value of land. Regional variations in property values were marked, with least signs of
improvement and investment in the older industrial cities. Inner-city dereliction signified
the lack of confidence in the urban housing market. By 1994, the United Kingdom had the
lowest annual number of housebuilding completions in the European Union, apart from
Sweden and Denmark, with about 150,000 new dwellings. This compared with over 350,000
per year in the 1960s and 250,000 in the 1970s. Specialised new build for the elderly, the
disabled and the chronically sick formed 38.8 per cent of all new completions in 1981 and
43.5 per cent in 1991, falling back to 27 per cent in 1995. The major shift was the diminished
role of the public sector. In 1981 local authorities built 14,375 new units for these three
groups, but only 2,312 in 1991 and 219 in 1995; between the same dates the private sector
contributions changed from 162 to 1,994 to 445 and Housing Associations from 2,425 to
2,660 to 1,948. In this critical area of housing provision for groups at risk the changing
responsibility from public to private sectors is very clear.
During the 1980s there was an ‘access crisis’ in urban housing with growing numbers
of people qualifying for help under the Homeless Persons legislation. Since 1990, the
DETR has committed over £180 million to the Rough Sleepers Initiative and has built
3,300 new accommodation units for the homeless in London alone. Estimates of the
numbers of homeless people are notoriously difficult to form, but the number is growing
and the problem is becoming more acute. The homeless comprise more variety than the
stereotype single male, and although the root causes may be economic and lack of jobs,
they are exacerbated in major cities by housing shortages and an influx of refugees.
Deinstitutionalisation has forced many mentally ill people out onto the streets and alcohol
problems and drug abuse often exacerbate their condition. Homeless people form an
extreme example of the process of social exclusion, being denied access to the most basic
of human needs. The introduction of an enterprise culture and the market ethic in housing,
as in other areas, has made the plight of the ‘losers’ more visible and extreme. There is
also a more telling human dimension, with research now showing that men living rough
are almost forty times more likely to die young than their contemporaries in secure homes
(Hawkes 1998). As in the United States (Wilson 1987), a ‘truly disadvantaged’ class of
urban dwellers has emerged.
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The central cities
Commercial functions
City-centre development has been an important facet of urban change in Britain. Initially
stimulated by the legacy of war damage, it has transformed city centres. The continuing
viability of city-centre retailing has led to a sustained flow of investment into shopping
facilities, and between 1965 and 1989 8.9 million square metres of retail floor-space had
been provided in 604 city centres of over 4,650 square metres (the Department of
Environment inspects all developments above this threshold). Between 1984 and 1994, 95
per cent of new retail space had been developed in existing city centres.
Allied with new shopping developments have been positive moves towards traffic
control and management and in-town shopping-centre projects, such as Nottingham’s Victoria
Centre and Broadmarsh and Newcastle upon Tyne’s Eldon Square, which have been designed
to add to or upgrade more traditional retail provision. The perceptible shift to policies with
a stronger commitment to public transport and more constraints on the use of private cars
has been matched by the appointment of some eighty-nine city-centre managers. Funding
remains an issue as the state looks for sponsorship from partners such as Chambers of Trade
and Commerce (representing local retail businesses) and commercial interest groups such
as property investors and developers (which have considerable political influence). Zoning
laws control out-of-town development and it is often argued that there is no other country in
the world which exercises such stringent planning controls over the retail system, particularly
by resisting the market pressures for a greater amount of decentralisation.
Given this support, large department stores continue to invest in the central city and
their presence is essential for the success of in-town schemes. Local authorities have also
improved central-city environments by landscaping and traffic management schemes, and
many office functions that have a high level of direct contact with consumers continue to
locate centrally. For financial and commercial offices, face-to-face contact, especially for
higher-level management, remains important. London, with its large share of the headquarter
offices of the largest UK companies, is dominant and its employment in producer services
increased from 13 per cent in 1971 to 23 per cent in 1989. Large-scale office developments,
especially in London, have been part of the cycles of property speculation and rising land
values that have brought employment and new consumers to the central city.
British inner-city policies have tended to understate the job-creation potential of
retailing despite its labour-intensive nature. The long-term decentralisation of jobs and people
has clearly affected retailing and an intra-urban hierarchy has emerged. In the interwar
years a specialised central-city shopping area extended outwards along main traffic arteries,
with local clusters and individual shops in the surrounding residential areas. With time a
more clear-cut set of shopping areas developed, classified as:
¿ a central area serving a population of at least 150,000;
¿ regional shopping centres which have developed from the smaller central areas in
conurbations;
¿ district centres serving local catchments of around 30,000;
¿ neighbourhood centres selling convenience goods in catchments of 10,000;
¿ local or sub-centres with small clusters of stores serving 500 to 5,000 people.
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Much of this framework already existed but was consolidated in the 1950s when
planned shopping centres were added to several levels of the hierarchy. It has been estimated
that in larger cities (over 250,000) 36.8 per cent of retail provision is found outside the
central area; this proportion is inversely related to city size and is 55.3 per cent for cities in
the 40,000 to 49,000 range.
Retail trade has experienced considerable structural change since 1945. There have
been upheavals in the methods and organisation of retailing, a blurring of the retailing/
wholesaling distinction, escalation of multiples, an increase in store size, and greater bulk
buying by consumers. These changes adversely affected small stores and between 1950 and
1966 the number of general stores fell by 56.2 per cent and of grocery retailers by 16.3 per
cent. In part this trend was related to out-migration and the subsequent decline of the ‘corner-
shops’, but it can also be tied to economies of scale and the changing organisation of retailing.
Already by the early 1970s, four organisations together operated nearly 4,500 grocery shops
and accounted for nearly 22 per cent of sales. There is some evidence for a renewed role for
small convenience stores in suburban locations. Large-scale retail organisations have sought
to develop large out-of-town sites, although in the late 1970s only Brent Cross in suburban
north London could be described as ‘out-of-town’.
By the late 1980s, three ‘waves’ of retail decentralisation had been recognised. The
first wave involved the emergence of superstores and hypermarkets during the period 1964
to 1975. A second wave between 1975 and 1985 was composed of retail warehouses, retail
warehouse parks and retail parks; the Enterprise Zones at Swansea and Dudley were typical
of this type of development. The initial sales emphasis was on DIY products, furniture,
carpets and electrical goods but expanded to include clothing, footwear, toys and car
accessories. The third wave dates from 1984 and the proposal by Marks and Spencer to
open out-of-town stores. This type of decentralisation affected the outlets for quality goods
and involved firms such as Habitat, Laura Ashley and World of Leather. Gateshead’s Metro
Centre, opened in an Enterprise Zone in 1986, was the first major example of an integrated
regional shopping and leisure complex. Following Metro Centre with its 136,430 square
metres of floor space, were Merry Hill, Dudley (143,000 square metres), Meadowhall,
Sheffield (116,250 square metres) and the Lakeside Centre at Thurrock (116,250 square
metres), with other planned developments in London, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow
(Figure 10.3). The idea of a fourth wave in the 1990s focuses on the conflation of retailing
with leisure tourism, with the emergence of outlet malls or shopping villages, such as the
Clarks’ Village at Street in Somerset, the shopping villages at Bicester, Oxford and at
Swindon. Other additions are the informal car-boot sales, new convenience chains, and the
emergence of tele-shopping which may have wider implications for the geography of
retailing. There is now much greater diversity in the provision of retail sales and consumer
choices are changing accordingly.
Objections to out-of-town centres stemmed from fears of their impact on city-centre
trade but the earlier hypermarkets affected smaller branches of multiples rather than
independent corner stores and many retailing firms retained city-centre stores. There is
some force to the concept of the disadvantaged consumer but empirical evidence is equivocal.
Mobility is unevenly available but there has been an expansion of convenience stores, discount
stores and shopping transport, to offset the effects of out-of-town centres.
Overall, retail provision has responded to the two basic needs of redeveloping outworn
parts of the central city and adding new facilities to rapidly growing suburbs. Both of these
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FIGURE 10.3 Regional shopping centres in the United Kingdom, 1996
Source: After Herbert and Thomas (1997).
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have been paralleled by changes in the organisation of retailing, shifts in consumer behaviour
and a fairly consistent planning attitude towards decentralisation. The protected central city
remains a strong and viable location for commercial functions, but there still remains a
need for a comprehensive planning strategy for retail development in and around the city
which reconciles the role of the centre with the continuing pressures for commercial
decentralisation. During the 1990s there are signs that city centres are being adversely
affected.
Jobs and the inner city
The industrial and manufacturing base of the inner cities virtually collapsed in the
second half of the twentieth century with devastating effects on the resident population.
Between 1951 and 1981, inner areas of the conurbations lost 45 per cent of their
employment; over a million manufacturing jobs were lost in the same period; Hall (1985)
cited a figure of 2 million lost factory jobs between 1971 and 1981 in the UK alone.
London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham all suffered serious losses mainly through
factory closures and the disappearance of traditional employers. The resident populations
were deskilled, and for the new kinds of jobs entering the inner city and London in
particular the demands were for professional skills and IT in keeping with the new
wave of producer services and finance. A continuing expansion of retail trade, office
employment and other services ensured a high demand for women’s employment but
these did little for unemployed industrial or dock workers. Again, there was an impact
on lower-skilled white-collar jobs as banks, for example, displaced their traditional
counter staff and tellers in an age of automated transactions. Commuting flows increased
in importance and resident inner-city populations, apart from those in the new gentrified
areas, had little stake in the restructured employment market. In 1996, inner areas of
cities such as London and Glasgow continued to have unemployment rates of around
15 per cent, which were well above those of surrounding areas. Green (1996) showed
that during the 1980s inner London and parts of other metropolitan areas emerged as
the main losers from the processes of social and economic change. Yet there was evidence
that employment was expanding during the 1990s in places where contraction had
dominated over the past thirty years. Cities with business and electronic networks placed
to act as centres of skill and knowledge could offer milieux favourable to innovation
and change. Large areas of derelict land and pools of labour might be sources of
opportunities rather than of despair (McLennan 1998). The optimism is real but has to
be tempered by the continuing low employment opportunities for black youth and less-
qualified sections of society.
Quality of life
Quality of life, mirrored in indicators such as lack of jobs, substandard housing, educational
disadvantage, crime, vandalism, drugs, and deprivation, has always been a concern for
the inner city. There are pockets of deprivation, and generalisations should not obscure
the considerable diversity which exists. It will be shown that the problem estates in the
outer urban rings can be at least as great a problem as the older parts of the central city.
Matthews (1991) estimated that with 7 per cent of the total population, British inner
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cities contained 14 per cent of the unskilled workers, twice the average number of
single-parent families, three times the national rate of long-termed unemployed, ten
times those below the ‘poverty’ line, and most of the schools classed as exceptionally
difficult. Although many individual households do not suffer these specific
disadvantages, they are still afflicted by deteriorating environments, vandalism, petty
crime and traffic congestion.
Inner cities also tend to have disproportionate vulnerability to hazards in the urban
environment. The 1992 Earth Summit agreed a policy titled ‘Agenda 21’ aimed at the
improvement of urban environments. This has proved most difficult to implement in the
inner cities where the key challenges of controlling infectious or parasitic disease, reducing
chemical and physical hazards, achieving high-quality environments, minimising transfers
of environment costs, and progressing towards sustainable consumption (Satterthwaite 1997)
can all be easily identified. As Gibbs (1997) noted, cities are the key economic units,
producing 60 per cent of global GNP—and there are inevitable environmental impacts.
Clean production and consumption needs to be accompanied by greater equity and democratic
involvement. There are many working examples. Leeds and Southampton have environmental
strategies; Cardiff, Manchester and Kirklees have environmental programmes set by planning
or environment departments.
Problem residential areas
For much of the nineteenth century, poverty areas were recognisable parts of the British
inner city. They were characterised by high levels of substandard housing and many
indicators of deprivation. The early waves of urban renewal and slum clearance schemes
had a major impact on these areas during the early twentieth century and many thousands
of households were transferred to social housing outside the traditional inner-city terraced
areas. It became clear during the 1970s and 1980s that the problems of the inner city
remained and were once again becoming acute. The pockets of deprivation became highly
visible, with outbreaks of rioting and social disorder, often with racial connotations.
Innercity areas had become repositories of people such as the unskilled, some ethnic
minorities, the elderly and the disadvantaged. Unemployment was high, housing conditions
were often poor, and tensions were high. Social indicators consistently showed wide
disparities between inner-city areas and suburbs, and Green (1996) confirmed the
persistence of these disparities and the poverty areas that still typified the inner city. Such
areas in particular have been adversely affected by the collapse of urban funding and the
withdrawal of inner-city strategies in the 1990s.
Such problem residential areas, however, are not restricted to the inner city. The
problem estate, variously referred to as the difficult-to-let or the sink estate, has become
a feature of public sector housing. Often the products of past policies of ‘dumping’ problem
families in the least-sought-after housing, these estates are typified by high levels of crime,
vandalism, drugs and forms of social disorder. Estates may go through community careers,
with the worst problems evident when demographic cycles endow them with higher
numbers of young people. Studies of incivilities, or signs of disorder in the urban
environment, often pick out estates of this kind at the earlier stages of a downward spiral
(Figure 10.4). Such estates have been described as disgraceful and degrading, adding
poor states of repair and lack of amenities to the high-unemployment and accompanying
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social problems. At Meadowell on Tyneside, Barke and Turnbull (1992) documented a
high unemployment estate where a drug culture, endemic crime and a sense of hopelessness
prevailed. The worst estates become characterised by high vacancy rates, and the City of
Swansea in 1998 was reputedly seeking to allocate unlet properties to refugees in an
attempt to generate income from government subsidies. Low demand for housing on a
specific estate is often the starting point for a cycle that leads to pockets of extreme
deprivation (Hall 1997). Hall identified six reasons for the deepening problems of the
worst estates. First, right-to-buy legislation had removed better housing to the private
sector; second, allocations of decreasing stock were made almost exclusively to
marginalised groups such as the homeless and single-parent families; third, gentrification
was displacing poorer tenants to edge estates; fourth, high rents without subsidies were
excluding the working poor; fifth, cut-backs in state spending reduced maintenance; and
sixth, the gap between council tenants and jobs was widening. One of the problems for
the people on problem estates is their relative remoteness from jobs, opportunities and
housing managers.
Gentrification and the return to the central city
The process of gentrification involves the upgrading of specific inner-city districts to
attract higher-income renters or owners. Such districts are often those with Georgian or
Edwardian terraces, most commonly three-storey, capable of modernisation and
FIGURE 10.4 Incivilities and neighbourhood change
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rehabilitation. Places such as parts of Islington in London have experienced a
considerable transformation as a result of this process. Housing improvement grant
legislation during the late 1960s and 1970s enabled gentrification. One intention was to
improve conditions for sitting tenants, but speculative owners, developers and the housing
market saw the potential to change the whole character and marketability of these areas.
Large numbers of dwellings were improved and sold at much inflated prices and this
had the effect of displacing former low-income tenants. These negative impacts of
gentrification involve displacement, loss of traditional communities, and overcrowding
elsewhere in the city. Positive impacts revolve around the physical and social
revitalisation of older areas at little public cost, new demands for goods and services
and positive spillovers.
The return of investment to the central city gathered impetus in the 1980s with
major redevelopments, funded by a mix of public and private funds, which transformed
old, derelict docklands in many cities into attractive and expensive residential areas.
This maritime quarter boom fuelled an inflow of investment, with the construction of
many new residential properties in imaginative mixes of dwelling types. The
transformation of London’s Docklands has had far-reaching effects linked both with
the expansion of producer services and the attractions of central water-fronted sites.
The Isle of Dogs was designated as an Enterprise Zone in 1982 and land values rose
from £100,000 to £7 million a hectare in five years. The Docklands Light Railway
linked Canary Wharf to the City and this single site could offer direct employment to
40,000 people. There were caveats to this story of growth. First, the new ‘yuppie’
communities were being constructed in close proximity to the residual docklands
communities and presented huge disparities in wealth and quality of life. There were
inevitably social conflict problems. Second, the investment into Docklands was overdone
and a recession was evident in the early 1990s, leading to a loss of confidence and
falling values of property. Some of the major property investors were badly affected
and recovery has been slow.
Urban conservation has been a feature of urban planning in Britain since the
formalisation of the listed building procedures, covering buildings of architectural or historic
interest, in the Town and Country Planning Acts of 1944 and 1947. The conservation area
concept arose most clearly from a court case involving two terraced houses in St James’s
Square, London in 1964. Conservation areas are subjective judgements, but the criteria
include special architectural and/or historical interest and buildings with a character or
appearance worth enhancing or preserving. With the growth of heritage tourism in its various
forms (Herbert 1995), historic cities such as Chester and Bath have become significant
attractions for visitors. Many of the major tourist attractions, including truly historic sites
such as the Tower of London and Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace, and more recent
constructions such as the Jorvik Centre at York, are located in cities. Many older cities,
faced with a loss of traditional economic activities, have turned to tourism as a panacea and
have striven to make use of whatever heritage, medieval or industrial, old or reconstructed,
that they might possess. For the really historic cities there are pressures from weight of
numbers. There is a ‘local fatigue’ (Strange 1997) arising from numbers of visitors, demands
on local infrastructures and conflicts with resident populations. Such pressures can threaten
the very qualities that make these places attractive and new regulatory mechanisms may be
needed.
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Immigrants and ethnic areas
Although the return to the central city of higher-income groups is not an insignificant trend,
the role of the inner city as a destination for immigrants and expanding ethnic minority
communities has far more telling effects on urban demography. None of the major ethnic
minority groups, Afro-Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, had less than two-
thirds of their populations in the conurbations in 1991 (Figure 10.5). All these groups had
shown growth in their conurbation populations over the previous decade, ranging from 1.6
per cent for Afro-Caribbean to 5.7 per cent for Bangladeshis. The Greater London and West
Midlands conurbations tend to dominate with, for example, almost two-thirds of all the
Afro-Caribbean and Bangladeshis resident in one or the other. The lesson from the 1991
Census was one of little change; ethnic areas in British cities have emerged and are
consolidating, but conditions do not resemble the ghettos typical of many cities in the United
States (Peach 1996; Robinson 1993). There is variety in ethnic housing and there is some
evidence that Afro-Caribbean households were decentralising from the innermost parts of
London and, to a greater extent than the other groups, had a significant presence in the
public sector of housing. The large majority of South Asians remained rooted to owner-
occupancy, low-cost areas of cities with a limited amount of professional suburbanisation.
Ethnic areas have been features of British cities for many years in areas such as
London’s East End and comparable districts in other major port cities. The modern wave of
immigrants from New Commonwealth countries began in the 1950s stimulated by poverty
and lack of opportunities in their own countries and the promise of better jobs and prospects
in the United Kingdom. In 1963/4 legislation to control the flow of migrants stopped the
main movements, but certain categories such as dependants and those with special skills
have continued to arrive. The earliest migrants were Afro-Caribbean, recruited at a time of
labour shortage by London organisations such as the large teaching hospitals, London
Transport and the Hotels and Restaurants Association. Other Caribbean immigration followed
the expanding car plants and engineering works in the London area and the West Midlands.
Indians followed a similar pattern (Robinson 1993), but Pakistanis moved further afield to
towns in the north of England such as Manchester, Oldham, Blackburn, Leeds and Bradford.
There were later Asian concentrations in the East Midlands (such as at Leicester), amplified
by forced migrations out of East Africa.
Estimates put the total size of the UK ethnic minority population at 2.6 million in
1990, forming 4.8 per cent of the total population, with the largest groups being Indian
(827,000), Afro-Caribbean (496,000) and Pakistani (455,000). Annual rates of increase
peaked with 98,000 in 1981, but were around 55,000 by the early 1990s. There is diversity
within the groups, with divisions by islands of origin among the Afro-Caribbeans and sub-
groups such as Sikhs and Gujeratis within the South Asians. Although the ethnic minorities
tend to occupy the same broad types of housing within cities, there is some evidence for
segregation within these sub-groups. The ‘ethclass’ had emerged, with clear social gradations
reflected in housing areas.
The Race Relations Act of 1976 was a key piece of legislation, but there has been
persistent discrimination in employment and housing markets against non-white immigrants.
The whole thrust of public policy since the 1970s has been to improve employment chances,
but always in difficult situations. There are greater numbers of ethnic minorities progressing
further in the educational system, and Asians in particular have proved very successful in
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FIGURE 10.5 Numerical distribution in 1991 of (a) Afro-Caribbeans, (b) Indians
Source: After Robinson (1994).